Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. is the president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus Education Fund. He is a minister, community activist, and organizer, and one of the most influential people in hip hop political life. Find out more about the Hip Hop Caucus and follow him on Twitter @RevYearwood.

On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and we became one of only two countries (along with Syria) not signed onto the accord. Four days later, on June 5, I stood next to Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, a powerful, forward-thinking women of color, as she signed an executive order commiting the District of Columbia to the very climate agreement from which President Trump withdrew. In doing so, she became part of a movement in communities and cities across this country saying “we are still in” to the Paris Agreement, a movement that has become the answer to U.S. action on climate change.

The bill is a powerful example of the climate leadership we need. D.C. is the largest city to make such an ambitious commitment. Just as remarkable, it supports opportunities for low-income communities in the transition.

The Clean Energy D.C. Act sets renewable energy standards for utility companies, improving the energy efficiency of buildings, and eliminating emissions from the public transportation system. It sets up a system that creates a penalty for utilities who are not keeping up with clean energy transition benchmarks.

The revenue from penalty fees go into the D.C.’s Renewable Energy Development Fund, which will in part be used to help low-income communities transition to clean energy and adapt to climate impacts. Thirty percent of the additional revenue will be put aside for programs like weatherization and bill assistance for low-income households, as well as job training in energy efficiency fields. More than $3 million annually will also be allocated toward energy efficiency upgrades in affordable housing buildings.

D.C.’s commitment to act comes on the heels of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recently released report which finds that the world has just 12 years to act before the consequences of climate change will bring drought, floods, extreme heat, and poverty to hundreds of millions of people.

The good news is that people and communities across the nation are taking action, and cities and states, through commitments like the one D.C. just made, can keep America on track to prevent irreversible climate change, even while the president and his administration deny climate realities.

Since President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, thousands of local, state, and tribal leaders, businesses and investors, colleges and universities, health organizations and more, have stepped up to say that “We Are Still In,” as part of America’s Pledge to act on climate change. This long list includes mayors from more than 230 cities across the country, representing more than 70 million Americans, who are taking steps to address climate change by building stronger communities and cutting their fossil fuel emissions.

The American Cities Climate Challenge is helping local governments accelerate their ability to act on climate by boosting innovation, community engagement and mobilization, and delivering high-impact solutions. This initiative is assisting 25 cities, including Washington, D.C., make the Paris Agreement goals a reality.

Young people are organizing en masse to pave a path forward for our leaders to take serious climate action. Over 1,000 companies worth over $8 trillion have pledged to divest from fossil fuels. Local leaders are leveraging partnerships to revitalize their communities, save taxpayers money, and protect public health.

In 2019 the movement will continue to focus on achieving commitments like D.C.’s in cities across the country. Let us keep building the movement, honor the Paris Agreement, and bring real solutions to communities on the frontlines of climate change.

When we are looking to our nation’s capital for climate leadership, and we don’t see it from the White House, all we need to do is look to city hall. President Trump is not the end all and be all on climate action in the U.S. The American people are. Let’s take our power and vision for a sustainable planet and healthy communities to our mayors and city councils, and together we will transition to clean energy, stop climate change, and provide opportunity and clean air and water for all communities.

]]>Reverend Yearwood with members of the DC Climate CoalitionThe State Department could gut Obama’s last remaining executive action on climate change.https://grist.org/article/the-state-department-could-gut-obamas-last-remaining-executive-action-on-climate-change/
Sat, 19 Jan 2019 12:00:33 +0000http://grist.org/?p=413580An independent review of the federal government’s actions on climate change might have inadvertently endangered President Obama’s last remaining executive action on global warming.

In 2017, five Democratic senators — including Sheldon Whitehouse, Dianne Feinstein, and Elizabeth Warren — asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a review of how federal agencies were addressing climate change as a “potential driver of global migration.” The nonpartisan “congressional watchdog,” studied executive and federal activities between 2014 and 2018.

The GAO report, which was released on Thursday, adds to the bleak picture of federal climate action under the current administration. It shows that while the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of Defense began to look into the nexus of climate change and migration while Obama was in office, much of that work has been undone by President Trump and his appointees.

The fact that climate connections have languished in several federal agencies over the past two years is not that surprising– President Trump has systematically dismantled musth of Obama’s climate legacy. But the report itself is having some unexpected consequences in certain parts of the federal government.

As a result of its inquiry into federal actions on climate change and migration, the GAO issued a recommendation to the U.S. State Department: it should provide its missions with guidance on how to assess risks posed by climate change. That’s something the department started to do after Obama issued an executive order on Climate-Resilient International Development in 2014. In response, according to the GAO, the State Department agreed to that recommendation this year — but added that the agency will consider asking President Trump to scrap Obama’s order.

“This is unprecedented within my experience that the agency would on the one hand essentially acknowledge and agree to the recommendation, but on the other hand begin working to consider whether to rescind the underlying executive action,” David Gootnick, director of international affairs and trade at the GAO, told Grist.

When the State Department develops its strategy for U.S. priorities in each country without including guidance on how to conduct climate change risk assessments, it misses out on opportunities to identify and address the potential impact global warming may have on migration, the GAO wrote. The department did not immediately provide comment, citing limited capacity due to the ongoing partial government shutdown.

The GAO report highlighted research on the global fallout of a warming climate, which it said raises “both humanitarian and national security concerns for the U.S. government.” Scientists have increasingly been able to attribute the growing severity of disasters like hurricanes and floods to climate change. Extreme weather events can often displace entire communities, and push people to move in order to rebuild their lives. Slow changes over time, like prolonged droughts and sea-level rise driven by higher average global temperatures, can also destroy livelihoods and factor into people’s decisions to migrate.

U.S. Government Accountability Office

Although the study notes that it’s difficult to quantify how much of a role climate change plays directly or indirectly on global migration trends, it did point to instances when federal agencies had made that connection in the past. In 2014, the Department of State wrote in its adaptation plan that climate change was a potential driver for migration and could affect the department’s peace-keeping efforts. That year, the Department of Defense stated in its adaptation roadmap that climate change was a “threat multiplier” that could threaten national security through migration. Also in 2014, USAID, which spearheads the nation’s international development efforts, identified climate-related events like flooding as a driver of migration and a risk to its aid programming.

The Trump administration has already revoked two other Obama-era executive actions on climate change: a 2013 executive order “preparing the United States for the impacts of climate change” and a 2016 presidential memorandum on climate change and national security.

Those actions have crippled the federal agencies’ ability to communicate with each other on climate change. It disbanded the Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience and the Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience — both of which brought together expertise from the Departments of State, Defense, and USAID.

“Those kinds of working groups are important for the U.S. government to bring its collective resources to bear and be able to be a partner with other bilateral and multilateral fora,” said Gootnick.

The GAO report also noted how the Trump administration has slashed funding for climate initiatives. And on top of vowing to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Trump administration also said that it would pull out of negotiations on the U.N. Global Compact for Migration, which is shaping up to be one of the first intergovernmental agreements to tackle climate-driven migration.

In an email to Grist, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who commissioned the GAO report, wrote, “President Trump’s immigration obsession has a serious blind spot: the role of climate change in driving people to flee their homes.”

]]>Secretary Of State Rex Tillerson Hosts Romanian President Klaus Iohannis At The State DepartmentBeto O’Rourke’s weird beat poem about wind powerhttps://grist.org/article/beto-orourkes-weird-beat-poem-about-wind-power/
Fri, 18 Jan 2019 19:13:07 +0000http://grist.org/?p=413512This week, while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was schooling Democratic lawmakers on the modern medium of Twitter, former Representative Beto O’Rourke, wandering the countryside after his loss to Senator Ted Cruz, threw it back to the classics with a little beat poetry. (Add that to the list of ways he’s eerily similar to your college boyfriend.)

“A lot of big trucks rolling down Pancake Blvd and there aren’t any sidewalks. Gloomy early morning sky in Liberal Kansas. Snow melt on the side of the road where I’m running,” he wrote on Medium.

Later, he visited a community college where students were learning to be wind energy technicians. “I looked up and imagined the courage it takes to climb out onto the face of these giant turbines, 250 feet up in the air.” He visited another college class and rambled, “Bring people together, over coffee, over beer.” Then, when the day was over: “I left and it was dark.”

Am I supposed to snap between paragraphs? Have you noticed that if you scramble the letters in Robert Francis O’Rourke, you can spell out “Beto Is Kerouac?” What’s going on?

After a few focused read-throughs, and a couple tabs of acid, we think we got the point: Wind energy is the future. Hey, is this Beto guy running for president or what? It’s not clear that he even knows the answer to that — “as is ever so on the road,” or whatever. But it got us musing about what we might hear if some of his potential competition went all beatnik on us, too.

Kirsten Gillibrand on Dockless Bikes

If America is a rebellious child, I am its young mother. But who is raising whom? When I myself am a dockless bike — no place, no policy to call home. Gun control? Immigration? We always search for the nearest bike. And why not choose the most convenient? My stance: going where the road — the app of life — takes me. May my brakes be unbroken and my wheels unsunk.

Elizabeth Warren on Heirloom Wheat

Beer. Heirloom wheat beer. Because everyone was mad at me for drinking Michelob Ultra. Was it really odd that I drank beer on Instagram Live, or was the world simply reflecting its own strangeness onto me — the hot afternoon sun on a shimmering field of heirloom wheat? The table next to me tells me about sustainable farming practices. I like the idea. I say, bring the whole world together over beer. I’ll take a Michelob.

Cory Booker on Vegan Meats

I climb down from a great Northern Red Oak, cat in hand. Return its furry body to a sobbing child. Would she weep for a cow? Realize with pride and clarity: I would. When people express resistance to the idea of a vegan president, I wonder: Have they tried the Impossible Burger? I look up and imagine the courage it took me to climb that tree. Mm, the Impossible Burger. Does it need to be real if it tastes like it might be?

Bernie Sanders on Plogging

I pay for my drink with quarters and dimes. The owner of a small Vermont coffeehouse looks up — it could only be me. He asks if I’m running. If a Subaru drives through Burlington in the dead of night, and no one is around to “Honk” if they “Love Ben & Jerry,” does it still get 38 miles per gallon? Let me just say this: I am plogging. And is that radical? When the top 1 percent of litterbugs produces more trash than the bottom 90? We must learn to plog before we can run.

]]>beto-beretEPA nominee Andrew Wheeler wasn’t ready for the Senate’s questions on climate changehttps://grist.org/article/epa-nominee-andrew-wheeler-wasnt-ready-for-the-senates-questions-on-climate-change/
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 22:37:03 +0000http://grist.org/?p=413396This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It was clear about halfway through Andrew Wheeler’s confirmation hearing to lead the Environmental Protection Agency that he wasn’t prepared for the number of questions he was getting on climate change.

Wheeler didn’t exactly answer, saying that he had not been fully briefed on the report because much of his agency’s staff isn’t working right now. “We’ve been shut down the last few weeks,” he said, explaining that he had only been briefed once by staff since the report was published in late November. He said his additional briefings were postponed; about 95 percent of his agency is furloughed.

The Republican majority gave Wheeler an unsurprising pass, defending his record as a lobbyist for an assortment of industries he now regulates, including his main old client, coal baron Bob Murray. But most of the Democratic members, which included several potential 2020 presidential contenders, grilled Wheeler on climate change.

Senator Bernie Sanders asked Wheeler if he considered climate change to be “one of the great crises that face our planet.”

“I would not call it the greatest crisis, no sir,” he answered. “I would call it a huge issue that needs to be addressed globally.”

When senators grilled him on climate change, Wheeler attempted to walk a fine line to sound more reasonable than the president’s talk of a “hoax,” but not go too far to suggest he would do much to crack down on rising greenhouse gas pollution.

“On a one to 10 scale, how concerned are you about the impact of climate change?” Senator Jeff Merkley (a Democrat from Oregon) asked Wheeler, saying that 10 would be an issue that keeps him “up at night.”

“I stay awake at night worrying about a lot of things at the agency,” Wheeler said, before volunteering an “eight or nine.”

Merkley didn’t hide his surprise. “Really?”

The senator challenged Wheeler on his go-to talking point that the EPA was taking action on pollution via its Affordable Clean Energy rule replacement for an Obama-era coal plant regulation and fuel efficiency standards. ACE doesn’t reduce carbon emissions from coal any more than market forces, and the EPA is weakening car standards and considering ending a waiver for California that implements more aggressive targets.

These policies already didn’t come close to the reductions needed to limit warming below a disastrous 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). But reversing them risks even more. Last year, greenhouse emissions continued to rise globally, including by 3.4 percent in the United States.

There was an even sharper focus on climate change than in past Trump-era EPA hearings. The conversation around climate change has shifted quite a bit since Wheeler last appeared before the Senate in August, a few weeks after he took the helm of the agency. Now Trump officials face more questions from the opposing party that dig deeper than the usual “Do you believe in climate change?”

The three senators who are considering presidential bids, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sanders, and Merkley, all centered their questions around climate change. Since August, the issue has become a top item for the House Democratic majority, and progressives have talked of an ambitious “Green New Deal.” Meanwhile, the science has grown more alarming: In addition to the National Climate Assessment, an October report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looked at the damaging effects from 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) of warming.

A protest interrupted Wheeler when he began on Wednesday, which never once mentioned the words “climate change,” as he ran through his greatest hits — deregulatory and otherwise — from his first year at the EPA.

The protests could still be heard faintly from the hallway when he continued his introductory remarks. “Shut down Wheeler! Not the EPA!”

]]>Senate Environment Committee Holds Confirmation Hearing For Andrew WheelerOne more reason not to drive in New York (that could also save the planet)https://grist.org/article/one-more-reason-not-to-drive-in-new-york-that-could-also-save-the-planet/
Tue, 15 Jan 2019 23:26:36 +0000http://grist.org/?p=413317New York could become the first U.S. city to charge people for driving a car downtown — that is, if Governor Andrew Cuomo gets his way.

During a “state of the state” speech to kick off his third term, Cuomo said a new congestion pricing plan would be part of his ambitious agenda over the next 100 days. The agenda also includes additional efforts like banning plastic bags and 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2040. Now that Democrats have unified control of New York government, this climate-friendly wish list could quickly become reality.

Congestion pricing would vault New York City towards a car-free future, and cement its leadership role on tackling climate change. But the fee wouldn’t kick in until sometime after 2021 and a lot could still change.

The idea of congestion pricing is simple: In a dense urban environment with great public transportation like lower Manhattan, operating a private passenger vehicle is actually harmful for society. Cars are dirty, loud, dangerous, and take up tons of space. If they get more expensive, fewer people will use them, carbon emissions will go down, and the streets will be safer — a win for everyone. Watch our video team explain the concept:

Congestion pricing isn’t new — it’s been in the works in NYC for a long time. When it first opened way back in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge charged horse-drawn carriages a fee to limit traffic downtown but the practice was eventually abandoned after public outcry. A 2008 plan under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to put a congestion price on automobiles didn’t make it through the state legislature.

Charging cars about the price of a fully -loaded Chipotle steak burrito to enter the densest urban environment in America isn’t an all-out, breakneck, emergency-level mobilization on climate change — but it’s a start, and it will be an important testbed for expanding the common sense policy nationwide.

]]>Light Trails, Brooklyn Bridge, Lower Manhattan, New York City, AmericaSportsmen flex their political muscleshttps://grist.org/article/sportsmen-flex-their-political-muscles/
Sun, 13 Jan 2019 12:54:05 +0000http://grist.org/?p=413036Thisstory was originally published byHigh Country News and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.

On December 2, 2017, onstage in a cavernous auditorium at Boise State University, two of the three Republican hopefuls for Idaho governor, Lieutenant Governor Brad Little and businessman Tommy Ahlquist, discussed their views on public lands in front of a crowd of hunters and anglers. The forum, sponsored by the Idaho Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and 16 other sportsmen’s groups, was a pivotal one in a state where public lands are a defining issue. The third candidate was conspicuously absent: Representative Raúl Labrador, whose voting record in the House already proved him a staunch public-lands critic.

In a political climate marked by public-land threats, Labrador’s absence spoke volumes, and he lost the primary to Little by five points. “In not coming to a sportsmen’s forum, you allow everyone to fill in the blanks,” said Michael Gibson, Idaho field coordinator for Trout Unlimited. “Governor-Elect Little was willing to come in front of hunters and anglers and say he supports public lands.” In a state where only 12 percent of voters are registered Democrats, that primary victory all but handed Little the governorship.

Republicans were once instrumental in passing laws like the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. In recent decades, however, the party has developed a reputation as the enemy of public lands, a stance further solidified by the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of protections. But in Idaho and Wyoming, two of the West’s most conservative states, hunters and anglers threw down the gauntlet, demanding state policies that protect access and voting down gubernatorial candidates who threaten public lands. As state legislatures shift in 2019, sportsmen’s groups are positioning themselves to fight the administration’s erosion of public-land protections.

In the early 20th century, conservation became a political issue in America, fueled largely by Theodore Roosevelt’s desire to protect rich hunting and fishing grounds. Republicans carried on that legacy until the early 1990s, when the GOP began opposing environmental initiatives. Once President Donald Trump took office in 2016, his administration slashed national monuments and put increasing amounts of public land up for resource extraction. In Congress, Republicans refused to renew the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a popular program that safeguards natural areas.

In the West, the Utah, Montana, and Nevada state legislatures have introduced resolutions urging the transfer of federal lands to state ownership. Sportsmen’s groups generally oppose such transfers, as they would likely limit public access. In Wyoming, for example, state parks ban camping, preventing multi-day backcountry hunting and fishing trips. In addition, state land is managed to fund schools, which means potentially cutting off public access in favor of gravel pits, increased logging, and land sales.

More than half of Idaho is federal public land, including the Frank Church-River of No Return, the biggest contiguous wilderness in the Lower 48, and 891 miles of wild and scenic rivers, including the Salmon, Owyhee, and Snake. But the state has no national parks. That’s partly because Idaho is a sportsmen’s state, and hunting is not allowed in national parks. In 1972, for example, state leaders from both parties ended a decades-long fight over making the Sawtooths a national park by designating the region a national recreation area, thereby protecting its status as popular hunting grounds.

In 2016, tensions boiled over when Texas billionaire brothers Dan and Farris Wilks purchased vast chunks of old timber company land that recreationists had long used to access adjacent public lands. Gates appeared on roads, cutting off hunters, anglers, and off-road vehicles. As the Wilkses bought increasing tracts, people’s frustrations grew, marked by enraged comments on news articles and letters to the editor.

A confrontation at a property line between an armed security guard and a recreationist helped push Idaho lawmakers to update trespassing law, which sowed further unrest. “Critics sought the entire session to pin the bill on Dan and Farris Wilks, the Texas billionaires who have angered hunters, ATV riders, campers and local officials in central Idaho after they closed off 172,000 acres of forest they bought in 2016,” the Idaho Statesman reported.

Voters like Jerry and Terry Myers, who manage a ranch and run guided fishing trips on the Salmon River, made public lands protections a central issue in the Republican gubernatorial primary. “We live here because we love this lifestyle, and we’re always continually working to keep that lifestyle as part of Idaho,” said Terry Myers, who is also president of the local chapter of Trout Unlimited. “Even if leadership isn’t coming from the top down, it’s coming from the bottom up, with the idea that those things built locally will build into the political arena.”

Labrador’s lackluster reputation on public lands galvanized the Myerses and other sportsmen. Opinion pieces in local media like Idaho County Free Press, Idaho State Journal, and Idaho Press denounced the representative as a public-lands-transfer activist, while groups like Idaho Wildlife Federation and League of Conservation Voters highlighted his voting record on public lands. His subsequent refusal to attend the candidate forum at Boise State confirmed voters’ suspicions. Little — the establishment candidate, who was seen as likely to continue outgoing Governor Butch Otter’s opposition to the land-transfer movement — prevailed.

In Wyoming, public lands proved one of the defining issues in the race for governor. As in Idaho, sportsmen are a powerful force: 30 percent of the state’s 600,000 residents applied for a hunting permit in the last five years, and 18 percent bought fishing licenses. “If you look at the voting public, which is 50 percent, I’m going to bet every one of those guys who hunt, vote,” said Dwayne Meadows, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. “And if you look at the fact that roughly two-thirds of the state are registered Republicans, that’s a lot of voting Republicans who are hunters.”

In August 2018, at a candidate forum hosted by the Wildlife Federation in the crowded Republican primary, three candidates, Harriet Hageman, Taylor Haynes, and Rex Rammell, expressed support for public-lands transfer, with Hageman going so far as to suggest a 1-million-acre pilot program of land transfer to the state.

Hunting groups picked up on the issue immediately. Right to Roam, the most listened-to hunting podcast in the state, made it the focus of an episode on the candidates. The Wyoming Hunters and Anglers Alliance endorsed Mark Gordon — a multiple-use public lands advocate who frequently hunts on Wyoming’s public lands — because of the forum, citing his stance on issues related to hunting, and his opponents’ stances on land transfer (Full disclosure: Both Gordon and Little formerly served on the board of High Country News.) Gordon won the primary with 33 percent of the vote, while Foster Friess, who received Trump’s endorsement but “provided a mix of positive, negative, and neutral stances on sportsmen’s issues,” according to the alliance, got 26 percent. Hageman, who had been polling well before the forum, came in with only 21 percent.

“I think all the public-lands transfer conversation has done is galvanize the sportsmen,” Meadows said. “You can see it in the growth of organizations like mine over the last few years, and it’s powerful.”

Public-land issues also had an impact in other Western states. In the New Mexico race for governor, Republican Representative Steve Pearce went on the record as supporting the Land and Water Conservation Fund despite previously voting against it in Congress. Pearce lost the race to Democratic Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham, who supported public-land protections and is also an avid fly-fisher. “Our community is a staunch supporter of public lands,” said Kerrie Romero, executive director of the New Mexico Guides and Outfitters Association.

“Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona are all moving more toward the Democrats, and that’s in part because of the GOP being tone-deaf as to why people of all political stripes value public lands,” said David Jenkins, executive director of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship. “I’ve always said that if you’re trying to change the political right on environment, you have to show how that aligns with their values — and in the West, people’s affinity for public lands is part of who they are.”

In 2019, sportsmen’s groups plan to continue the advocacy that helped Little and Gordon win their governorships. In rural states like Idaho and Wyoming, it can be hard to track what the legislature is voting on day to day. Even if citizens have a subscription to a Cheyenne or Casper newspaper, those papers won’t always list individual legislators’ decisions.

That is one reason the Wyoming Wildlife Federation is launching bill tracking with real-time alerts to follow specific legislators, so that citizens can let their elected representatives know how to vote. The group is also stepping up recruitment of local ambassadors in rural communities, to help explain how public-lands transfer and the administration’s removal of protections could limit public access.

Groups like Trout Unlimited and Artemis, a new sportswomen’s advocacy organization, plan to ramp up trainings that teach people how to testify in hearings, call their elected officials and generally engage in local politics, all tactics intended to remind state politicians of the groundswell of local support that helped put public-land proponents in office.

Sportsmen’s groups are already taking action in the federal arena as well: On the first day of the 116th Congress, House lawmakers reversed a 2017 measure that made it easier to sell off or transfer public lands — a measure that had been widely criticized by hunters and anglers.

“The overarching thing that every sportsman can agree on is public-lands defense,” said Gibson. “Over beers or at meetings, we might argue about regulations or season length. But whether the season is a week or a month, or you keep two fish or four fish, you have to have access to them.”

]]>Scenic view of Stanley Lake and Sawtooth Mountains at Stanley IdahoMinnesota youth demand Green New Deal in meeting with governorhttps://grist.org/article/minnesota-youth-demand-green-new-deal-in-meeting-with-governor/
Thu, 10 Jan 2019 23:29:01 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412926On Wednesday, more than 100 youth from across the state ascended the snow-free steps of the Minnesota capitol building to meet with newly inaugurated Governor Tim Walz and demand comprehensive action on climate change.

The group, Minnesota Can’t Wait, was there to push for a Green New Deal. Organizers called it the country’s first youth-led, state-level effort to demand the policy, which pairs labor and environmental justice efforts. In response to the meeting, Walz announced that he would immediately establish a statewide cross-agency working group on climate change.

Minnesota’s winters are warming faster than almost anywhere else in the country. In their conversation with the governor on Wednesday, youth spoke of their love of outdoor ice skating and dog sledding, but also their fear of the rise in infectious diseases and climate disasters.

Minnesota Can’t Wait wants state government to tackle the issue from all angles: In addition to pressuring the governor and legislature on Green New Deal legislation, the group calls for a ban on fossil fuel projects and executive action to regulate emissions. The demands are in line with what IPCC scientists say is necessary to stabilize global warming at 1.5 degrees C, the point above which change is expected to become large enough to disrupt society at a grand scale.

“The idea is that we stop making decisions based on what is politically possible and start doing what is necessary,” said Lia Harel, age 18, from Hopkins, Minnesota. “That’s been the driving force in getting these youth to act, because we don’t have time to wait any more.”

The event was inspired by sit-ins organized by the Sunrise Movement in congressional offices in Washington, D.C., and around the country in recent weeks, and wasn’t originally intended to include a meeting with the governor. However, a representative from Climate Generation, a Minnesota-based youth organization that helped plan the event, said that once organizers informed the governor’s office of a planned sit-in, the governor offered instead to meet with the young people.

“What you’re asking for is concrete changes, which is what you should be asking for,” Walz told the youth. “This move is a tangible evidence of where we are going to go.”

Minnesota’s new state legislative session kicks off with Democrats just one Senate vote away from total control, and a new House committee explicitly focused on climate change for the first time.

“I met with youth climate leaders several weeks ago,” said Jean Wagenius, the state representative chairing the new House climate committee, in an email to Grist. “We will be working with them to rapidly accelerate efforts to reduce climate change gases.”

“We talk about having a table where the people who are directly affected by issues can pull up a chair and make sure that they’re seen, heard, and valued,” Flanagan said in an interview with Grist after the event.

That willingness from elected leaders to listen to youth describe the need for radical climate policy has been rare so far. With federal action toward a Green New Deal seemingly stalled for now, youth are hoping for quicker progress at the state level.

That could happen in Minnesota. In Walz’s inauguration address this week, he made a clear call for bold climate action. “Instead of burying our head in our hands when it comes to our changing climate or to providing affordable housing, accessible healthcare and good-paying jobs, we must tackle them head on,” Walz said.

Towards the end of his conversation with Minnesota Can’t Wait, Walz asked the youth to go back to their communities and make the case for the radical change that would benefit future generations as well as the state’s current economy.

It helped that his daughter, Hope, was also there, on her 18th birthday. At one point, she raised her hand, stood up behind her father, and said, “I’m just going to ask how I can get involved with the group, you know, so there’s a better chance of him following through.”

]]>mn-youth-climate600+ environmental orgs say this is what they want in a Green New Dealhttps://grist.org/article/600-environmental-orgs-say-this-is-what-they-want-in-a-green-new-deal/
Thu, 10 Jan 2019 23:11:12 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412922The urgency to get to a fossil fuel-free future is growing. Now comes the discussion over just how to get there.

The Green New Deal is taking shape — not so much in Congress (at least not yet), but certainly among the nation’s environmental groups, many of which came together to outline want they do and don’t want to see in any future climate legislation.

On Thursday, more than 600 organizations submitted a letter to House representatives with a list of steps they say are required “at a minimum” for the U.S. to help keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The message was signed by green movement heavyweights like 350.org, Greenpeace, Sunrise Movement, and Friends of the Earth — as well as many local grassroots groups, including Communities for a Better Environment in California and WE ACT for Environmental Justice in New York.

The recommendations include:

A complete shift to 100 percent renewable power generation by 2035.

An end to all fossil fuel leasing, extraction, and subsidies. That includes putting a stop to the export of crude oil and other fossil fuels.

Greater investment in renewable-energy-powered public transportation and better incentives for electric vehicles, with a goal of phasing out fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks by 2040.

More input from Native American tribes, workers, and the communities most impacted by fossil fuels. The letter says these groups should have the first say in what the transition away from fossil fuels looks like because a lot of energy infrastructure disproportionately impacts the places where they live.

The letter also says the Clean Air Act should be used to rein in greenhouse gases. Traditionally, the act is associated with air pollution, not CO2. That said, carbon is often released with co-pollutants, and communities breathing the worst air say Congress should tackle pollution and climate change with one fell swoop.

The letter closes with a vow by the signing organizations to “vigorously oppose … corporate schemes that place profits over community burdens and benefits, including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, [and] carbon capture and storage.” (Carbon trading programs, like California’s popular cap-and-trade system, have been called out for making air quality worse in some communities, and critics of carbon capture say it takes the focus away from creating an economy that isn’t dependent on fossil fuels).

Browsing the 600+ organizations that endorsed the letter, there are still some big names missing, including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council.

]]>Protesters seen holding placards during the Sunrise MovementIt was a bad year for carbon emissions, even in Californiahttps://grist.org/article/it-was-a-bad-year-for-carbon-emissions-even-in-california/
Wed, 09 Jan 2019 23:10:01 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412823Carbon emissions are rising in the the United States, and it looks like the golden green state of California is part of the problem. Despite putting up acres of solar panels, California’s electric system produced more greenhouse gases in 2018 than in the previous year.

It’s part of a larger trend across the country. A preliminary estimate out this week says carbon dioxide emissions climbed 3.4 percent last year, the second largest increase in two decades, according to the research firm Rhodium Group.

What happened? An unusually cold spell last winter led people to turn up their furnaces. And after years of modest growth, the U.S. economy picked up in 2018. There were more planes in the air, more trucks delivering packages, more offices cranking air conditioners, and more factories burning fossil fuels.

In 2017, California had a relatively wet year, and was able to run water through hydropower turbines when the sun set over solar panels. There was less water to spare last year, so the state turned to gas plants in place of dams.

The rise in power-sector emissions is especially concerning in California because the state has made curbing pollution from power plants a priority, enacting legislation to promote renewable energy and cap fossil fuels. Yet California’s emissions have risen and fallen in line with the rest of the country.

In 2018, for instance, emissions from electricity generation rose 1.9 percent across the country, and 2 percent in California.

California emissions from electricity generationCalifornia ISO

Trevor Houser, a climate and energy analyst at the Rhodium Group, said we shouldn’t make too much of California’s backsliding because the state had significant emissions reductions in the recent past. Last year’s 2 percent increase in electricity-sector emissions comes after a 9 percent decline in 2017 and a 13 percent decline in 2016. If you look at the three-year moving average, California is still making good progress when it comes to electricity.

Decarbonizing electricity is just the beginning of the challenge: “Far more important for California climate progress will be what happens in transportation, which is more than twice the emissions of the electric power in the state,” Houser said.

U.S. emissions peaked back in 2007, then quickly plunged with the Great Recession. A switch from coal power to natural gas and renewables also pushed down the country’s carbon pollution. All told, emissions fell 12 percent between 2007 and 2015. Since then, the country has continued to shift from super-polluting coal to less-polluting natural gas, but this report shows that we’ve been burning a lot more natural gas to make electricity.

Previously it had looked like the United States had a shot at meeting pledges made as part of the Paris climate talks, despite President Donald Trump’s rejection of that agreement. Now it’s painfully obvious. in Last year’s emissions have pushed the United States far off target.

]]>OxnardThe Green New Deal is changing as we speak. Here’s whyhttps://grist.org/article/heres-the-green-new-deal-debate-you-havent-heard-yet/
Wed, 09 Jan 2019 12:00:36 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412739Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Elizabeth Warren. Beto O’Rourke. Those are just a few of the high-profile names either leading the development of or jumping to endorse today’s environmental cause célèbre, the Green New Deal. Inside congressional halls, at street protests, and, of course, on climate Twitter — it’s hard to avoid the idea, which aims to re-package ambitious climate actions into a single, wide-ranging stimulus program.

The Green New Deal is being promoted as a kind of progressive beacon of a greener America, promising jobs and social justice for all on top of a shift away from fossil fuels. It’s a proposal largely driven by newcomers to politics and environmental activism (and supported, however tentatively, by several potential presidential candidates and members of the Democratic political establishment). The plan aspires to bring together the needs of people and the environment, outlining “a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty.”

But within the broader environmental movement, not everyone was initially gung-ho on the Green New Deal — at least not without some stipulations.

To understand the debate surrounding the Green New Deal, you need to look beyond its recent prominence in Beltway political circles to the on-the-ground organizations that make up the environmental justice movement. Newcomers like Ocasio-Cortez may be leading the charge, but grassroots leaders who have spent years advocating for low-income families and neighborhoods of color most impacted by fossil fuels say their communities weren’t consulted when the idea first took shape.

For all the fanfare, there isn’t a package of policies that make up a Green New Deal just yet. And that’s why community-level activists are clamoring to get involved, help shape the effort, and ensure the deal leaves no one behind.

Something Old, Something New

Although the term “Green New Deal” has evolved over time, its current embodiment as a complete overhaul of U.S. energy infrastructure was spearheaded by two high profile entities: progressive darling and first-term Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Sunrise Movement, an organization formed in 2017 by young people hellbent on making climate change the “it” issue.

In November 2018, Ocasio-Cortez, with support from Sunrise, called for a House select committee to formulate the package of policies. More than 40 lawmakers signed on to support the draft text. Then shortly before the end of the year, Nancy Pelosi, now the speaker of the House, announced the formation instead of a “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.”

It wasn’t exactly a win for the leaders of the new environmental vanguard. Sunrise tweeted its displeasure at the committee’s pared-down ambition, taking umbrage with its lack of power to subpoena (a condition for which Ocasio-Cortez had advocated) and the fact that politicians who take money from fossil fuel interests would not be excluded from sitting on it.

The fuss over who gets a say in the formation of the Green New Deal goes back further than Ocasio-Cortez’s or Sunrise’s friendly-ish feud with establishment Democrats. The Climate Justice Alliance, a network of groups representing indigenous peoples, workers, and frontline communities, says its gut reaction to the Green New Deal was that it had been crafted at the “grasstops” (as opposed to the grassroots).

Shortly after Ocasio-Cortez put out her proposal for a select committee, the alliance released a statement largely in support of the concept, but with a “word of caution”: “When we consulted with many of our own communities, they were neither aware of, nor had they been consulted about, the launch of the GND.”

Leaders at the alliance surveyed its member organizations — there are more than 60 across the U.S. — and put together a list of their concerns. Unless the Green New Deal addresses those key points, the alliance says, the plan won’t meet its proponents’ lofty goal of tackling poverty and injustice. Nor will the deal gain the grassroots support it will likely need to become a reality.

“What we want to do is strengthen and center the Green New Deal in environmental justice communities that have both experience and lived history of confronting the struggle against fossil fuel industries,” Angela Adrar, executive director of the alliance, told Grist.

Grist asked several indigenous and environmental justice leaders: If the Green New Deal is going to make good on its promises, what will it take? Here’s what they said.

A more inclusive and democratic process that respects tribal sovereignty

As details get hashed out on what a Green New Deal would actually include, longtime environmental justice organizers say their communities need to be the ones guiding the way forward. “The way that the plan was developed and shared is one of its greatest weaknesses,” Adrar says. “We want to be able to act quickly, but we also want to act democratically.”

She adds that involving the grassroots is especially important in the wake of the 2018 midterm elections, which ushered in many new congressional members pledging to focus on the underrepresented communities they come from. The Climate Justice Alliance is calling for town halls (with interpreters for several languages) to allow communities to help flesh out policies to include in the Green New Deal.

Some of the disconnect could be generational, says Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. Many of the leaders espousing the Green New Deal are young people. He says that he and his colleagues were caught off-guard when they saw the plan on social media and that when his network reached out to its members, there was little familiarity or understanding of the Green New Deal.

“Maybe the way of communication of youth is different than what we’ve found in the environmental justice movement and our native movement around the value of human contact — face-to-face human contact,” he says. “We’re asking that leadership of the Green New Deal meet with us and have a discussion how we can strengthen this campaign with the participation of the communities most impacted.”

Any retooling of America’s energy infrastructure will undoubtedly venture into Native American tribes’ lands, where there are already long-standing battles over existing and proposed pipeline expansions, as well as fossil fuel facilities. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples calls for “free, prior, and informed consent” from tribes before developers begin any project on their land. So indigenous environmental groups say there needs to be respect for tribal sovereignty and buy-in from tribes for a Green New Deal to fulfill its promise of being just and equitable.

Green jobs should be great jobs

There has been a lot of talk in Green New Deal circles about uplifting poor and working-class communities. Advocates have floated ideas ranging from a job-guarantee program offering a living wage to anyone who wants one to explicitly ensuring the rights of workers to form a union.

But as workers’ rights organizations point out, energy and extractive industries have provided unionized, high-paying jobs for a long time — and they want to make sure workers can have the same or a better quality of life within green industries.

“There’s been a long history of workers that have been left hanging in transition in the past,” says Michael Leon Guerrero, executive director of the Labor Network for Sustainability, which has been working to bridge divides between labor and environmental issues. “For that reason, there’s quite a bit of skepticism in the labor sector.”

Joseph Uehlein, who founded the Labor Network for Sustainability, adds that there needs to be more than just the promise of jobs to entice labor to support a Green New Deal. “Every presidential candidate in my lifetime talks about job creation as their top priority,” he says. “Over the last 40 years, those jobs have gotten worse and worse. A lot of jobs are not so good, requiring two or three breadwinners to do what one used to be able to do.”

Uehlein hopes an eventual Green New Deal will ensure not just jobs that guarantee a living wage, but will go one step further. “We always talk about family-supporting jobs,” he says. “It’s not just about living, it’s about supporting families.”

Do No Harm

Any version of a Green New Deal would likely ensure that the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of energy — with Ocasio-Cortez setting the bold target of the nation getting 100 percent of its energy from renewables within 10 years.

But defining what exactly counts as “renewable energy” has been tricky. There are plenty of sources of energy that aren’t in danger of running out and don’t put out as many greenhouse gases as coal or oil, but are still disruptive to frontline communities. Garbage incineration is considered a renewable energy in some states, but it still emits harmful pollutants. And when it comes to nuclear energy or large-scale hydropower, the associated uranium extraction and dam construction have destroyed indigenous peoples’ homes and flooded their lands.

The Climate Justice Alliance is also pushing to exclude global warming interventions like geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration, which they believe don’t do enough to address the root causes of global warming. Both technologies have to do with re-trapping or curbing the effects of greenhouse gases after they’ve been produced. “Carbon capture and sequestration, it’s a false solution from our analysis,” Goldtooth says. The focus needs to be on stopping greenhouse gases from getting into the atmosphere in the first place, he and other critics argue.

As the alliance sees it, a future in which the planet survives requires a complete transition away from fossil fuels and an extractive economy, and toward a regenerative economy with less consumption and more ecological resilience.

Goldtooth and his colleagues are calling for solutions that rein in damaging co-pollutants on top of greenhouse gases. And they support scalable solutions — like community solar projects — that are are popping up in some of the neighborhoods that are most affected by climate change.

A good start

Even though the Green New Deal faces many political obstacles, its proponents are still pushing forward at full speed. “We are calling for a wartime-level, just economic mobilization plan to get to 100% renewable energy ASAP,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on New Year’s Day.

Scientists recently estimated that the world has only 12 years to keep average global temperatures from increasing beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — the upper limit which many agree we can’t surpass if we want to avoid a climate crisis. The urgency around the latest climate change timeline has brought a lot of new advocates to the table.

According to John Harrity, chair of the Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs and a board member at the Labor Network for Sustainability, the labor movement is becoming more willing to engage on ways to address climate change. “I think the Green New Deal becomes a really good way to put all of that together in a package,” he says. “That evokes for a lot of people the image of a time when people did all pull together for the common good.”

Elizabeth Yeampierre, steering committee co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and executive director of the Brooklyn-based grassroots organization, UPROSE, which works on issues cutting across climate change and racial justice, calls the Green New Deal “a good beginning for developing something that could really have lasting impacts and transformation in local communities and nationwide.”

Since the alliance put out its recommendations, Yeampierre says she’s been in regular contact with both the Sunrise Movement and Ocasio-Cortez’s office. “To their credit they were responsive and have made themselves available to figure out how we move forward in a way that doesn’t really step over the people,” she explains.

Yeampierre, Goldtooth, and other representatives of the Climate Justice Alliance met with Representative Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday*. In a video, Ocasio-Cortex said the purpose of the meeting was to figure “how we can bring the direct communities impacted into the space of leadership so they can draft and lead a Green New Deal.”

“We need to be able to trust that communities can govern themselves and I’m so excited to have heard and uplift those solutions,” she said.

The language in Ocasio-Cortez’ draft proposal has already changed — it now includes clauses to “protect and enforce sovereign rights and land rights of tribal nations” and “recognize the rights of workers to organize and unionize.” The document has doubled in length since it was put out in November (at time of publication, it is 11 pages long) and will likely include new edits in the coming days.

Varshini Prakash, a founding member of the Sunrise Movement (and a 2018 Grist 50 Fixer), says she agrees with the Climate Justice Alliance’s recommendation that a Green New Deal prioritize the needs of workers, frontline communities, communities of color, and low-income communities. “Their critiques,” Prakash tells Grist, “are fully valid, and I appreciate what they’re bringing.”

The broad overview of a Green New Deal in Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for a select committee, Prakash says, was hashed out quickly after the representative’s team approached Sunrise late last year. (Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to Grist’s inquiry). “This was very rapid fire, it happened on an extremely tight timescale,” she says. “We didn’t have a lot of time to do the broad consultation we wanted.”

But Prakash, Yeampierre, and other leaders in the movements for environmental and climate justice are working to make sure there are more folks on board moving forward.

“Climate change isn’t just going to threaten our communities — it’s also going to test our solidarity, it’s going to test how we build relationships with each other,” Yeampierre says. “So I think the Green New Deal can be used as an opportunity to show that we can pass that test.”

*This post has been updated to include Ocasio-Cortez’s meeting with the Climate Justice Alliance.

]]>green-new-dealThe EPA hired GOP oppo firm because it was sick of ‘fake news’https://grist.org/article/the-epa-hired-gop-oppo-firm-because-it-was-sick-of-fake-news/
Mon, 07 Jan 2019 23:22:28 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412679This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Mother Jones first reported in December 2017 that the Environmental Protection Agency had hired a hyperpartisan GOP opposition research firm known for its aggressive tactics to handle the agency’s news-clipping work, the politically appointed flacks in the agency’s press office insisted the decision was about saving money and that the hiring had been handled through normal procurement channels. As we reported Thursday, we now know that was not the case. Internal emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that political appointees in the EPA press office demanded that career staff push through the hiring of Definers Public Affairs — best known for its work for Republican campaigns and recently for its role as Facebook’s attack dog on Capitol Hill, which included attempts to smear George Soros for his critiques of the social-media network.

Now, thanks to another batch of internal emails, we have even more evidence that the motivation for hiring Definers came from the top agency political appointees who were ticked off at the old service because it was collecting too many news clips that portrayed then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt negatively.

News clipping services are used by public relations offices both inside and out of the government to help keep track of the wide constellation of media outlets that might be talking about a topic of interest. The product they create — usually a roundup of headlines or excerpts — is an internal document designed to keep those inside the agency informed about press coverage. Liz Purchia, a press staffer in Obama’s EPA, noted that “cherry-picking the clips so you only saw the good ones” isn’t typically done, because it “doesn’t give you a realistic picture.” The collection of clippings is not usually publicly distributed.

But according to the new batch of emails, also obtained through FOIA, top EPA political staff were sick of the previous news clipping service’s propensity to include headlines that tended to make the controversial new appointee, who brought to the EPA a Rolodex of industry connections, look bad.

“Is it necessary to include all the negative headlines that go out to everyone?” complained Samantha Dravis, the agency’s associate administrator for policy, in a March 17, 2017, email to John Konkus, who now leads the EPA’s press office. “I could care less what Al Gore thinks about Scott Pruitt’s position — why is that news?? Who puts this together?”

Konkus, who had previously worked at Republican consulting firm Jamestown Associates, replied that he agreed and that this was an ongoing problem with the news clipping service at the time, a Virginia-based company called Bulletin Intelligence that had provided news clip roundups to the EPA and a number of other federal agencies for several years.

“We had them on the phone about a week ago complaining about the tilt and they said they would change,” he wrote. “They haven’t.”

Don Benton, a White House senior adviser to the EPA, forwarded the whole chain of complaints to his counterpart at the Department of Homeland Security, a political operative named Frank Wuco. A former military consultant, Wuco once created an alter-ego Islamic terrorist character that he featured in videos and as a host for radio shows in which he warned of the danger of Islamic extremism. Benton told Wuco that a scientist had told him that Bulletin Intelligence disseminates “fake news” and suggested Wuco “look into it.” The email was sent to Wuco’s private email address. Wuco’s reply, if any, was not included in the FOIA materials.

Neither Wuco nor Benton replied to a request for comment on the email exchange.

This was early in the Trump administration, but the aggressive and overtly partisan strategy eventually carried over into the EPA’s public operations. The EPA generated even more negative headlines for itself by blocking reporters from events, trying to plant negative stories about EPA reporters in conservative outlets, scripting interviews with Fox News, and calling reporters names, like when then-spokesperson Jahan Wilcox called a reporter a “piece of trash.” The EPA’s spending on Pruitt’s travel, his security, and his soundproof phone booth were already under scrutiny when the EPA approved a contract with Definers.

Charles Tiefer, a professor of contract law at the University of Baltimore, told Mother Jones: “One of the main reasons that we have a corps of career government contract personnel is to keep the political people away from giving the taxpayer money out to political cronies.”

]]>Scott PruittFacebook got into hot water for hiring this PR firm. The EPA was another one of its clients.https://grist.org/article/facebook-got-into-hot-water-for-hiring-this-pr-firm-the-epa-was-another-one-of-its-clients/
Sat, 05 Jan 2019 12:00:01 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412409This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Newly obtained emails reveal that officials at the Environmental Protection Agency were misleading about the circumstances under which they hired a Republican opposition research firm known for its aggressiveness and willingness to sling mud. They also show the inner workings of a government press office hijacked by political operatives who adopted a combative attitude to the press, seeking to generate rosy headlines from sympathetic outlets while simultaneously lashing out at reporters and whistleblowers who criticized the agency, including by planting negative stories about them.

The EPA’s hiring of Definers Public Affairs stood out in the staid world of government contracting, where any appearance of explicit partisanship, of the kind the organization specializes in, is studiously avoided. Definers’ reputation as partisan and hyper-aggressive has recently helped embroil Facebook in scandal after it was revealed that despite trying to project an inoffensive and bipartisan image in Washington, the Silicon Valley giant had secretly hired the firm to disparage its Washington critics. The lines of attack included spreading supposed evidence showing that opposition to Facebook was fueled by liberal donor George Soros.

After Mother Jones revealed the existence of the EPA’s $120,000 Definers contract in December 2017, the agency’s press office fought back, claiming the contract had been awarded through the agency’s Office of Acquisition Management after a competitive bidding process based solely on cost considerations.“The contract award was handled through the EPA Office of Acquisition Management and was $87,000 cheaper than our previous media monitoring vendor while offering 24-7 news alerts once a story goes public,” then-EPA Spokesperson Jahan Wilcox told Mother Jones last year.

This is not completely true.

It is only one of the findings that appear in thousands of pages of internal EPA emails reviewed by Mother Jones that contradict the reasons Wilcox said the contract had been awarded. Moreover, the emails provide a detailed picture of how the Trump administration immediately and aggressively tried to realign the agency and route taxpayer dollars for partisan purposes. The campaign to undermine environmental enforcement and oversight at the EPA has not ended simply because Scott Pruitt and several of his staff have left the agency.

“One of the main reasons that we have a corps of career government contract personnel is to keep the political people away from giving the taxpayer money out to political cronies,” Charles Tiefer, a professor of contract law at the University of Baltimore, explains. “Politicizing the award of contracts by mugging the career people is the definition of corruption. What the political people made the career people do this time was more like a banana republic than the United States.”

For the Trump administration, politicizing government practices is the norm. But the EPA, an agency that some conservatives, including Scott Pruitt, believe should be eliminated, has long provided a special window into how far the administration is willing to go to assert overt partisanship and override recalcitrant career staff in ways that alter the daily work of government.

Definers is linked to a deeply interconnected network of conservative political groups run by Joe Pounder, a former campaign staffer for Rubio who has been described as “a master of opposition research,” and founded by Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager. It lists the same Virginia address as the America Rising PAC and America Rising Squared, a nonprofit that has sent staff to ambush and film environmental activists like Tom Steyer and Bill McKibben. On its website, America Rising Corp. — a separate entity from American Rising Squared, which doesn’t have to disclose donors — describes itself as “an opposition research and communications firm whose mission is to help its clients defeat Democrats.” The news aggregator Need to Know Network, which purports to “work with partners and organizations to provide content that is unique and original to our audience,” was founded by Pounder and other operatives and shares staff and offices with Pounder and Rhoades’ other political entities.

Obtained by the Sierra Club from a FOIA request, the EPA emails show that the press office was interested in Definers and working with NTK from the start, disregarding the cost and concerns about the uncompetitive bid raised by career staff. While one group sought a $120,000 contract, another posted flattering coverage of Pruitt.

A former employee of the EPA’s Office of General Counsel told Mother Jones that the “whole notion that the agency is using a group like Definers and [NTK] and manipulating the media coverage of its activities” in ways the public isn’t aware of could have violated Congress’ appropriations law prohibiting the EPA from using funds for propaganda and publicity purposes. “Somebody reads a story and thinks it’s a straight news story, when in fact the agency is putting out misleading information that’s very offensive and probably violates the Appropriations Act,” the former staffer said.

Jahan Wilcox, a senior strategic adviser in its press office, came from the world of political operatives, working for Rubio’s presidential campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee before being tapped by the EPA. Wilcox did not return a request for comment, nor did Definers or NTK. The EPA’s normal operations have been affected by the government shutdown and also did not return a request for comment.

Shortly after he was appointed to the EPA in March 2017, Wilcox made his first contact with NTK. “With the 100 Days of the Trump Administration coming up, we were curious if Need To Know (NTK) news would like to report on the accomplishments of Scott Pruitt and the EPA?” he emailed Jeff Bechdel, communications director for America Rising PAC and managing editor for NTK the month he arrived.

NTK, working off a set of talking points about the EPA’s intended rollbacks provided by Wilcox “and other stories out there,” wrote the story: “How Scott Pruitt is Reshaping the EPA in the First 100 Days,” which the EPA in turn shared on social media as laudatory coverage of Pruitt. Wilcox forwarded the story to his colleagues, adding, “I know huge.”

From January to November 2017, NTK ran about two dozen positive stories about Pruitt. One included him on a list of “3 Possible Replacements for AG Sessions if he Returns to the Senate.” Others attacked critics, like in “Dem Senator Files Bogus Complaint Against EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt,” and touted wins, like in “Pebble Mine Settlement Huge Win for Jobs, Trump, and Pruitt.”

The EPA faithfully pushed the stories out on its social-media feeds and in its news clips. “Still waiting on us to tweet out this story from NTK,” Wilcox emailed the comms staff regarding May story “Pruitt Promises to Put States Back in the Driver’s Seat on Regulations.”

When Pounder approached the EPA on May 19, he identified himself in the memo he sent to Wilcox pitching Definers as a potential vendor as the president of America Rising Corp. Wilcox and other political appointees immediately warmed up to the idea of hiring Definers, and they pushed EPA career staff to hire them. Career EPA staff raised concerns about the contract, including that it had not gone through a competitive bidding process, but the political staff dismissed those concerns and pressured contracting officials throughout July and August 2017 to complete the deal.

As the months dragged on without Definers being hired, Wilcox and other political staff repeatedly questioned career employees about the holdup.When told that the effort to hire Definers had slowed because the company wasn’t even registered as a federal contractor and seemed reluctant to do so, Wilcox forwarded the explanation to Pounder. Shortly after, Pounder sent Wilcox a screenshot showing that the company was now officially registered.

According to these emails, the costs associated with the contract were hardly discussed because there was no competitive bidding process. Political appointee Liz Bowman, the EPA’s top spokesperson, complained at one point that George Hull, one of their career colleagues who was responsible for overseeing the contract, “has been dragging on for weeks and weeks.”

“I don’t care how this happens but we need to make this happen as quickly as possible,” Wilcox emailed Hull in June. Hull replied at another point: “We cannot move forward without going through a competitive bidding process,” including a presentation about the product. Wilcox at first dismissed the importance of a demonstration, saying: “I know the quality of their product.” Pounder eventually spoke with a career staffer about the service.

Tiefer acknowledges that while there might have been a legitimate need for a clipping service, Wilcox or any other political staff should not determine the contracting requirements. Career employees are required to vet potential contractors, and Tiefer says he doubts that, given Definers’ background in aggressive political opposition work, the company would have been chosen without interference from the political appointees.

“I have been teaching government contracting for over 20 years, and I have never seen a political operative firm getting a government contract,” Tiefer says.

Wilcox also was in touch with NTK throughout this period. He emailed Bechdel about an exchange with Eric Lipton of the New York Times, who had reached out to the EPA to confirm details for a story in October 2017. The EPA responded with neither a confirmation nor denial, instead linking to other outlets. Wilcox then framed the story for NTK. “You can report that the New York Times is calling USA Today ‘Fake News,’” he wrote. “Let me know if you are interested in this.” Bechdel passed on the pitch.

Finally, in early December, the EPA formally approved the Definers contract for $120,000. As soon as Mother Jones broke the story, the EPA faced mounting questions about the nature of the award. When Mother Jones sent questions to the EPA last year, Bowman immediately emailed Pruitt Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson and Enforcement Adviser Susan Bodine, claiming she knew “exactly where this leak came from.”

As Definers and the EPA faced calls for an Inspector General audit and for a Government Accountability Office investigation, the EPA and Definers decided it wasn’t worth the negative publicity. Five days after the report, and six months after Wilcox first advocated the contract, the EPA and Definers mutually agreed to cancel it. Definers said it would forgo contracts under negotiation with at least four other government agencies, including the Department of Education. By then, Pruitt’s trickle of controversies — chartered and first-class flights, a private phone booth, a 24/7 security detail, blurred lines between campaigning and government business — were already becoming regular headlines.

When the mounting investigations into whether he exploited his government position for other gain became too much of a liability, Pruitt resigned from the administration and was replaced by Andrew Wheeler in July. The EPA press shop saw high turnover as well. Wilcox resigned within days of Pruitt’s departure, and was most recently working for Wisconsin Republican Leah Vukmir’s unsuccessful campaign to defeat Senator Tammy Baldwin.

But others from Pruitt’s time remain, and even though the EPA’s media tactics may not be as aggressive as they once were, some of its earlier strategy still continues.

That was clear in late November, when the Trump administration released a thoroughly vetted National Climate Assessment, authored by 13 agencies including EPA scientists. Wheeler responded to the report with a dog whistle, arguing that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the Obama administration told the report’s authors to only look at the worst-case scenario of global warming. The echo chamber kicked in: By the end of the day, the Koch-funded Daily Caller had supposedly proven Wheeler’s point (in a story disputed by the report’s authors), and the EPA blasted it out as a “Fact Check” news alert.

]]>Environmental Protection AgencySenate confirms 4 Trump nominees to top environmental posts in last-minute votehttps://grist.org/article/senate-confirms-4-trump-nominees-to-top-environmental-posts-in-last-minute-vote/
Fri, 04 Jan 2019 21:14:15 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412527This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Senate voted to confirm at least four of President Donald Trump’s nominees to top environmental posts Thursday in last-minute votes just hours before the 115th Congress adjourned.

The confirmations, which received mixed reaction from environmentalists, fill long-vacant roles and save the White House from having to restart the nomination process with a newly sworn-in 116th Congress.

The nominees, among more than 60 administration officials confirmed in the 11th-hour voice vote, include those picked for executive posts at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Council on Environmental Quality.

At EPA, Alexandra Dunn was confirmed to lead the agency’s chemical office. Dunn previously served as the EPA administrator for Region 1 in Boston. She won praise overseeing the New England region as an “apolitical” bureaucrat who The Boston Globe described in an August profile as gaining “respect for protecting the environment.”

The position as assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention was left open since 2017, when former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt nominated Michael Dourson, whose consultancy InsideClimate News described in 2014 as the “one-stop science shop” favored by the chemical and tobacco industries. Dourson dropped out as Republican support for his nomination waned.

The other EPA nominee — the Senate’s final confirmation, just minutes before adjourning — faced more intense scrutiny from environmentalists and public health advocates. William Charles “Chad” McIntosh, Trump’s pick for the EPA’s Office of International and Tribal Affairs, came under fire in March when HuffPost reported on his 19-year career as the head of Ford Motor Co.’s environmental compliance and policy divisions.

During his tenure at Ford, degreasing chemicals spilled at a manufacturing plant in Livonia, Michigan, and broke down into vinyl chloride — linked to cancers of the liver, brain, lungs, lymph nodes and blood — and tainted the local groundwater.

“You can’t ignore these kinds of toxic chemicals in such an enormous quantity on your property, so whoever was in charge of the environmental state of affairs at this plant did not do his job,” Shawn Collins, an attorney representing homeowners whose groundwater was affected, told HuffPost in March. “That’s McIntosh.”

Among the most controversial nominees was Daniel Simmons, a former fossil fuel lobbyist who questioned climate science, to lead the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. After the White House nominated him to the post in June, Simmons backtracked on some of his past criticisms of renewable energy, insisting he “likes” zero-emissions energy sources. But, as Utility Dive reported, he previously served as the vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research, a coal- and oil-backed think tank, and for the American Energy Alliance, its lobbying arm. The latter organization called for the abolition of the office Simmons will now oversee as recently as 2015.

Among the least controversial was Mary Neumayr, Trump’s pick to lead the Council on Environmental Quality. The president initially nominated Kathleen Hartnett White, a die-hard climate denier and fossil fuel ideologue, to run the seldom-discussed White House agency, which oversees the National Environmental Policy Act. But Hartnett White flamed out during her confirmation hearing, delivering one of the most embarrassing performances of any nominee as she withered before senators’ questions about basic earth science.

Neumayr, by contrast, appeared to be a “more middle-of-the-road” pick, The Washington Post surmised in June, citing her “reputation as a pragmatist.” She spent much of her career working for the federal government, including eight years as the chief counsel on energy and environmental issues for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. During her confirmation hearing, she told senators, “I agree the climate is changing and human activity has a role.”

But unnamed insiders close to Neumayr, who until Thursday served as the Council on Environmental Quality’s chief of staff, told the Post she’s a strong supporter of the president’s deregulatory agenda. ThinkProgress criticized Democrats on the Senate committee that vetted Neumayr’s nomination for going easy on her.

The power of the Council on Environmental Quality changes from administration to administration. But the White House released a 55-page infrastructure plan in February that calls on the council to “revise its regulations to streamline NEPA would reduce the time and costs associated with the NEPA process.” Neumayr would be central to overseeing that process.

EPA declined an interview request, sending an email stating: “Due to a lapse in appropriations, the EPA Press Office will only be responding to inquiries related to the government shut down or inquiries in the event of an environmental emergency imminently threatening the safety of human life or where necessary to protect certain property.”

Neither the White House nor Energy Department immediately responded to requests for comment.

“Without defeating climate change, nothing else long term is possible for the future of our children,” the folksy Democrat told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in an interview Wednesday. Inslee said he’d prioritize climate change over the likes of other hot-button issues like health care, immigration, or gun violence.

Just one problem: One of the residents of Inslee’s state isn’t so convinced that the governor is the climate champion he’s selling himself as. Jamie Margolin, a 17-year-old activist in Seattle who founded the youth climate organization Zero Hour, sued Inslee over climate change along with 12 other young people last year. The suit claimed that the governor and state agencies weren’t doing enough to stop carbon emissions and were violating their generation’s constitutional right to a stable climate.

As a constituent of @JayInslee who SUED HIM OVER NOT TAKING CLIMATE ACTION I can testify to the fact that JAY ISNLEE HASN'T DONE SHIT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE. Just ask the people suffering from the new fossil fuel projects he's approved. He is full of BS.https://t.co/txRTp1Gn91

Margolin said that Inslee “fought tooth & nail” against the youth lawsuit, which was dismissed in August. She also tweeted that Inslee had approved multiple new fossil fuel projects — and ignored indigenous people when approving a liquid natural gas terminal in Tacoma, Washington.

Jamal Raad, a spokesperson for Inslee, says that the governor “has not approved one piece of fossil fuel infrastructure.” In 2018 alone, Inslee rejected a proposed coal-export terminal on the Columbia River and an oil-by-rail facility planned for Vancouver, Washington. But Margolin and other environmentalists point back to the Tacoma terminal. Construction began on the Port of Tacoma site in 2016, but the project is still going through the permitting process.

So is it fair to characterize Inslee as “all talk” on climate, as Margolin claims?

Well, the governor did coauthor a 2007 book on what an Apollo Program-like effort to create a clean-energy economy would look like. And in his seven years as governor of Washington, he has “pursued arguably the most progressive and greenest agenda in the country,” the Atlantic’s Edward Issac Dovere writes, “with fields of solar panels, fleets of electric buses, and massive job growth to show for it.”

In the interview with Hayes, Inslee seemed most animated about potential policies that still have yet to pass. “We’re gonna adopt a 100-percent clean grid law,” he said. “I believe we will pass a clean fuel standard. We intend to make net-zero homes. And we intend to outlaw super-pollutants.”

Is all that enough to make the governor the national face of climate action?

“If @GovInslee changed suddenly and was willing to listen to the youth and indigenous people of his state,” Margolin tweeted, “I would be happy and open to working with him.

I don’t want to be picking a fight with my Governor. I get 0 out of it. @youthvgov and I have tried to work with him before and he has betrayed the youth again and again. As a youth from his state I am simply warning the country that he is not a real climate champion. All talk. pic.twitter.com/YxOSnld9OE

In any case, the prospect of a climate-focused presidential candidate is more promising than since, well, Al Gore — or maybe ever before. In the 2016 presidential debates, the subject of climate change came up for a measly total of 5 minutes and 27 seconds. But the issue may finally garner the airtime it deserves this cycle, with prospective and declared Democratic candidates like Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and billionaire donor Tom Steyer — oh right, and Inslee — all getting amped up about climate change in the early days of what’s sure to feel like a never-ending campaign.

]]>inslee-111 takeaways from the Washington Post’s climate ideas op-edhttps://grist.org/article/11-takeaways-from-the-washington-posts-climate-ideas-op-ed/
Thu, 03 Jan 2019 20:56:09 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412413In 1956, journalist Waldemar Kaempffert published an article in the New York Times warning of future environmental catastrophe — including global temperature rise — if humanity failed to curb CO2 emissions. “Such a comparatively small fluctuation seems of no importance,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, it can bring about striking changes in the climate.”

Kaempffert’s climate assertions, unfortunately, did not set a precedent for the decades of environmental coverage to come. For many years, many top media companies have neglected to cover climate change — and when they do pay attention, it’s usually only because President Trump did or said something about it.

But anecdotally, it seems like climate change coverage might be picking up steam. This past weekend, NBC’s Meet the Press devoted a full hour to climate change — a first for a weekend news program.

Great to see the climate crisis getting increased attention from major media outlets recently. Latest example: Today’s @WashingtonPost editorial on effective ideas to combat the climate crisis: https://t.co/WQTLlWZ438

If you’re too busy to read the full Post article, don’t stress. We’ve got the CliffsNotes version right here:

Pass local emission goals. Look, we all know the federal government isn’t moving on this anytime soon. The Trump administration has been systematically dismantling Obama-era Clean Air regulations and continues its love affair with coal power. So we need all levels of government and businesses to green up and curb global warming.

Reduce the use of air conditioners, which contain hydrofluorocarbons, a more potent greenhouse gas than even CO2. “Globally, a phasedown of HFC refrigerants could avoid up to 0.5 degree Celsius of warming by 2100,” wrote Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.

Make electric vehicles easier to use and more affordable. Electric vehicles need not only be the way of the Silicon Valley. Federal tax credits, expanded infrastructure (i.e. charging stations), and incentive measures could make EVs the car of the future.

Keep existing nuclear plants running… for now. Nuclear power is controversial but the Post article posits they’re necessary until more low-carbon solutions are available (lest they be replaced by natural gas).

Design cities to encourage people to walk, not drive. How do you encourage more cyclists and pedestrians? For starters, well-lit intersections, covered bus stops with clear signage, and protected bike lanes. If you need more inspiration, check out this video from about how Grist’s very own Even Andrews (aka Umbra) gave up her vehicle.

Curb food waste by avoiding unnecessary production. In an actual embarrassment of riches, the world lets a third of its food supply go to waste. Composting, and food recycling help place limitations what edible items end up in the landfill heap, but the best strategy is to avoid unnecessary food production in the first place.

Incentivize carbon farming. That’s right – farming doesn’t need to lead to plumes of CO2 and pesticide runoff. With the right techniques (and legislation!), farming can give back to the earth, sequestering carbon in the soil instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.

Secure a moratorium on new factory farms. Factory dairy and meat farms lead to a lot of earth-warming methane (and they don’t even need to report emissions). The article recommends rural communities transition to more resilient, carbon-effective agriculture models by halting new construction (and subsidization) of these massive productions, and focus on reducing overproduction at existing facilities.

Adopt a carbon tax. Former Florida representative (and a 2017 Grist 50 Fixer) Carlos Curbelo writes that carbon taxes are “the best way to inspire such a wide-ranging, meaningful change, at the pace that we need it.” Curbelo proposes using carbon tax revenue to “robustly fund our nation’s infrastructure, help coastal communities adapt to the immediate effects of climate change and give low-income Americans and displaced workers assistance in the transition.”

Stir up competition between electricity companies to get them to retire inefficient plants. In theory, companies will switch to cleaner fuels when they become cheaper.

“Radical change from one state, or even the whole United States, won’t address climate change on its own,” writes the Washington Post Opinion section staff, “but taking these actions could help start the planet down a path toward a better future.”

]]>Newspaper boxes stand outside the Washington Post buildingThe term ‘eco-terrorist’ is back and it’s killing climate activistshttps://grist.org/article/the-term-eco-terrorist-is-back-and-its-killing-climate-activists/
Wed, 02 Jan 2019 17:45:43 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412257When devastating wildfires were sweeping the West last fall, Ryan Zinke, who recently announced his resignation as Interior secretary, lay the blame for the blazes on a ragtag group of environmentalists. “We have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups that have not allowed public access, that refuse to allow the harvest of timber,” Zinke said in an interview with Breitbart News.

Environmental activism has long put protesters at odds with government officials. But instead of dismissing climate-conscious demonstrators as hippies or “tree huggers,” government officials have begun using more dangerous labels — including “terrorist.”

“I had absolutely no time to react,” said Zanna Vanrenterghem, a staff member at Climate Action Network Europe who was pulled off a train from Vienna to Katowice by border patrol agents. “The fact that this happened to 15 other people for similar reasons is very frightening. This is just a very small symptom of a larger disease.”

When it comes to justifying (and promoting) extreme actions, language matters. As Grist’s Kate Yoder wrote, earlier this year, labeling activists as “eco-terrorists” isn’t new. Charges of eco-terrorism peaked in the 1990s, but dissipated for the most part by 2012.

Now the term is starting to pick up steam again. And the consequences of treating environmentalists like terrorists can go to much further lengths than denying them entry to a climate conference.

Standing Rock was a turning point in the American war of words against climate activists.

In 2016, law enforcement agents used tear gas and water cannons (despite freezing temperatures) on Dakota Access pipeline protesters at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Since those protests, dozens of bills and executive orders have been introduced to suppress similar environmental demonstrations.

Activists say this is part of an aggressive campaign by fossil fuel companies and their government allies to increase criminal penalties for minor violations — such as trespassing on a pipeline easement — as a way of suppressing climate action. Eighty-four members of Congress sent a bipartisan letter to the Department of Justice last fall, asking officials to prosecute pipeline activists as “terrorists.” And bills introduced in Washington and North Carolina would have defined peaceful demonstrations as “economic terrorism.”

And as we know in the U.S., branding a group of people as “terrorists” is kind of a big deal.

The label of “terrorism” has always been contested and politicized. Advocates for human rights say that the term has been used to suppress criticism of the government or corporate interests. “Making antiterror laws, that’s the most rational, the most logical tool [governments] use against indigenous people and all those that are critical of government,” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights indigenous peoples, during a panel discussion this spring at the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

Daniel Sheehan of the Lakota Law Project, which provided legal defense to Standing Rock protesters, likened modern cries of domestic terrorism to anti-communist rhetoric in U.S. history. “Instead of communist, they now call you a terrorist, anybody who’s opposing the capitalist system,” says Sheehan. “What you get is this thing called industrial terrorism, these statutes that say if you do anything which is a direct action to attempt to impede a corporation from being able to pursue its business and to make its profit, that is terrorism.”

“The fact that corporations are trying to frame environmental advocates in that way, it’s just a very clear example of how they’re trying to stigmatize it without addressing the concerns of the movement which are very legitimate,” says Rodrigo Estrada, senior communications specialist at Greenpeace. “In the end, this is about the protection of communities and the environment.”

While the backlash against Standing Rock protesters was iconic, it was far from the most serious consequence of anti-activist fear-mongering.

In February 2018, the President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines sought to label Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations special rapporteur, as a terrorist. Tauli-Corpuz’ job is to look into abuses against indigenous peoples and present her findings and recommendations to the United Nations Human Rights Council. She’s been a vocal advocate for global action on climate change. And even before her tenure began in 2014, she has been a staunch defender of her tribe’s land, the Kankana-ey Igorot people of the Cordillera Region in the Philippines. Tauli-Corpuz has also called attention to the killings of indigenous Lumad people, who have long defended their land from logging and mining interests.

President Duterte filed a petition to designate more than 600 people, including Tauli-Corpuz, as terrorists for their alleged connections to the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army. Duterte has also waged a bloody “war on drugs” (which some critics say has also been an excuse to eliminate his political opposition) that has led to thousands of alleged drug-dealers being killed by police and vigilantes.

In an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Tauli-Corpuz called the allegation of terrorism against her “entirely baseless and malicious.”

“The government sees this as an opportunity to pursue people they don’t like. I am worried for my safety and the safety of others on the list, including several rights activists,” she said.

The charge against Tauli-Corpuz was dismissed last August after an international outcry. But many other activists remained on the president’s petition to designate individual leaders and the Communist Party of the Philippines as terrorists.

“The inclusion of human rights defenders, amongst them indigenous peoples, on the Government list amounts to intimidation and harassment of people who are peacefully defending their rights,” wrote Michel Forst, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders.

Just last month, two members of Brazil’s landless activist group Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra were killed following comments from (then-candidate, now President) Jair Bolsonaro in which he called them “terrorists.” His comments have also been linked to assaults against members of Brazil’s indigenous groups, many of which are fighting to keep protected status for their lands. (In one of his first acts as President, Bolsonaro issued an executive order giving the anti-environmentalist Agriculture Ministry power to decide on indigenous lands.)

The activists’ murders in Brazil are the latest in a long line of alleged crimes against people who oppose Bolsonaro’s plans to ramp up deforestation in the Amazon. Brazilian activists fear Bolsonaro could inspire even more violence against environmentalists and indigenous peoples.

“Bolsonaro’s racist, fascist, genocidal government will not be enough to silence us,” said Dinamã Tuxá, coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples, in an interview with Amazon Watch. Still, he hinted at the fact that President Bolsonaro’s word choices could be continue to result in loss of life for indigenous activists down the road.

“This violence has become institutionalized and has saturated state institutions,” he said.

Back in the U.S., protesters are worried law enforcement is planning to employ violent tactics to stop anti-pipeline demonstrations in 2019.

In September, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained emails in which U.S. government officials characterized pipeline opponents as “extremists” and violent criminals that could commit potential acts of “terrorism.” The documents suggested that police were organizing counter-terrorism tactics to clamp down on possible Keystone protests. (If construction on the embattled Keystone XL pipeline advances in the coming months, it will likely draw protests from indigenous and environmental activists.)

“Evidence that the federal government plans to treat Keystone XL protests with counterterrorism tactics, coupled with the recent memory of excessive uses of force and surveillance at the Standing Rock protests, raises immense concerns about the safety of indigenous and environmental protestors who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights,” wrote Jacob Hutt, a fellow at the ACLU, in a blog post for the organization.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, Estrada of Greenpeace says the alarmist language may be a sign of progress. “The more effective people are becoming in mobilizing, the more backlash they’re going to face … If you corner a wild animal, they’re going to come really hard back at you.”

“The more we can voice that these things are happening,” Estrada says, “the more strength that we can provide to those people that are on the frontlines of these very dangerous situations.”

]]>UN Climate Conference COP24 Day 8Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking pollutershttps://grist.org/article/trumps-epa-isnt-so-tough-on-law-breaking-polluters/
Tue, 01 Jan 2019 12:00:47 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412226This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is more likely to give polluters a pass when they violate laws intended to keep the air healthy and water clean, according to recent reporting by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a watchdog group.

By analyzing public data and interviewing past and current EPA employees, EDGI documented notable declines in agency law enforcement this year, particularly in EPA Region 8, which includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and 27 Indigenous nations. According to an internal EPA report, by mid-year, Region 8 had opened 53 percent fewer enforcement cases in 2018 than in 2017. And it concluded only 53 civil cases in 2018, less than half the number in any year since at least 2006. Nationally, EDGI found a 38 percent drop in the number of orders requiring polluters to comply with the law, and a 50 percent drop in the number of fines.

EDGI’s analyses are based on provisional numbers, which the EPA routinely cleans up at the end of each year, so the exact figures could change when the agency’s annual enforcement report is released. Still, EDGI expects the general trend to hold.

“It’s another iteration of EPA’s industry-friendly approach,” said EDGI member Marianne Sullivan, a public health expert at William Paterson University. “It says we’re prioritizing industry’s needs and desires over the health of our environment and the health of our communities.”

In the short term, dialing back enforcement could be a particularly effective way to relieve industry of the burdens of environmental protections. President Trump’s EPA appointees have tried to formally roll back regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan and a rule safeguarding water from toxic coal ash. But it’s a slow and public process that invites lawsuits. Simply declining to enforce the law, however, can subtly accomplish the same thing, because it happens largely out of public view, and EPA administrators have wide discretion over it.

EPA officials deny ignoring violations of the law. “There has been no retreat from working with states, communities, and regulated entities to ensure compliance with our environmental laws,” spokesperson Maggie Sauerhage wrote in an email. “Focusing only on the number of federal lawsuits filed or the amount of penalties collected fails to capture the full range of compliance tools we use.”

Still, the agency acknowledges a shift in focus from “enforcement” to “compliance.” That means it’s likely to work less as a cop than an adviser with the companies it regulates, an approach critics say could incentivize companies to cut corners.

“Focusing on compliance instead of enforcement is a way of saying, ‘We might make people get back into compliance, but we’re resistant to the idea of punishment,’” explained David Janik, an attorney who managed Region 8’s legal enforcement program until 2011. But punishment helps you achieve compliance, Janik added. It deters polluters from spoiling the air and water in the first place, just as traffic tickets make drivers think twice about speeding. “If I go 90 and I get caught, I’m paying $200 for punishment,” he said. “If one chemical company has a big case and they pay $40 million to settle it, other companies will say, ‘Maybe I should hire another guy to make sure we don’t slip into noncompliance.’”

In some cases, lackluster enforcement since Trump took office appears to have been a boon to corporate pocketbooks, while the environmental benefits remain murky. Consider the difference in how a series of oil and gas cases were handled under President Barack Obama.

In 2015, the EPA and the state of Colorado jointly entered into a landmark settlement agreement with Noble Energy covering thousands of gas storage tanks that were leaking volatile organic compounds. VOCs are part of the toxic soup that contributes to smog levels on Colorado’s Front Range that exceed federal limits, exacerbating asthma and other respiratory diseases.

The settlement required Noble to pay a nearly $5 million fine, spend $60 million to reduce VOC emissions, and report its progress to the public. Two parallel cases resulted in smaller, but still substantial costs to companies in Colorado and North Dakota.

But under [former] EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, three similar cases came with remarkably cushier terms, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. In all three, the EPA declined to assess fines for the violations at all. And it’s unclear what, if anything, the companies were required to do to fix the problems. The companies were all Oklahoma-based, raising questions of favoritism from Pruitt, a pro-oil-and-gas Oklahoman.

The Noble case was part of an Obama-era National Enforcement Initiatives program focused on air pollution from oil and gas drilling. National initiatives historically targeted problems particular to certain industries and they’re where big enforcement cases were often made. But in August, Susan Bodine, EPA’s current head of enforcement, announced that the program was being renamed “National Compliance Initiatives,” and that the agency would discontinue the campaign on oil and gas in 2019, a move industry pushed for.

“It’s really about who’s going to benefit,” Sullivan said. “If industry doesn’t have to capture as much pollution, that may be good for their bottom line. But it puts the burden on the public. You can’t pollute for free. Either industry pays to capture it, or people pay with their health.”

]]>USA, Florida, Industrial smokestacksStates are out of money to keep national parks safe during shutdownhttps://grist.org/article/states-are-out-of-money-to-keep-national-parks-safe-during-shutdown/
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 16:55:27 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412202We are now 10 days into this partial government shutdown, and national parks are really feeling the hurt.

National Park Service staff are among the roughly 800,000 federal workers affected by the shutdown. Even though rangers are on furlough, tourists are still visiting these protected areas– with potentially disastrous consequences.

The problems go beyond a lack of toilet paper in the park potties. In Texas’ Big Bend National Park, trash is piling up, which conservationists fear could attract bears and lead to them become permanently habituated to human food. At Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, dozens of cars were seen entering the park despite the lack of park staffing. In California’s Joshua Tree National Park, the Los Angeles Times reports that tourists have strung Christmas lights on the park’s fragile namesake trees.

“We’re seeing so much damage,” said Joe De Luca, an employee at a local mountain supply store, in an interview with the Times. “It’s a free-for-all in there. Absolutely ridiculous.”

In the days before the shutdown began, the National Parks Conservation Association, a non-profit, wrote that during the January 2018 government shutdown, there were similar incidents: “One hunter illegally killed a pregnant elk at Zion National Park when few staff were available to monitor wildlife and enforce rules. Other visitors brought snowmobiles dangerously close to the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone and drove off-road vehicles illegally into Joshua Tree National Park, leaving tire tracks and harming vegetation.”

Some especially impassioned locals near Joshua Tree are taking it upon themselves to empty trash receptacles and police the park for illegal activity — duties normally performed by temporarily out-of-work park staff.

But today, Utah’s state funding to keep Arches, Canyonlands, and Zion National Parks running with minimal staffing ran out. Rescue services aren’t available in the parks, parts of which are very remote. The Utah Board of Tourism says only Zion will remain staffed in the new year based on funding from a non-profit organization, which will pay about $2,000 to $2,500 a day until January 5.

All the shutdown-related conservation chaos brings into sharp focus how essential park rangers are for preserving these national treasures. So once things (hopefully) get back to normal, make sure to tell one how important they are.

]]>President Obama Speaks At Yosemite National Park Marking 100th Anniversary Of The Creation Of America's National Park SystemCuomo talks big about climate change. Now it’s time for New York to pass actual policies.https://grist.org/article/cuomo-talks-big-about-climate-change-now-its-time-for-new-york-to-pass-actual-policies/
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 11:07:00 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412049If you want to hear some fiery climate promises, just listen to a recent speech by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. In the span of a couple minutes, he blasted the federal government’s inaction on climate change, vowed to “leave this planet better than we found it,” and promised to make New York’s electricity 100 percent carbon-neutral by 2040 — and eventually, completely eliminate the state’s carbon footprint.

Despite these strong words, some aren’t holding their breath until they see concrete steps from Cuomo (after all, this is the same governor who just in May headlined a gala funded by oil companies.) “It’s only a statement, and that’s not strong enough,” says Patrick Houston, an organizer with New York Communities for Change. “We urgently need bold climate goals to be written into the law.”

New York state has its best chance in years to pass progressive climate legislation in 2019, when Democrats will take control of the state Senate for the first time in a decade. (They already have a majority in the state House.) The midterm elections positioned many states to take bolder action, ushering climate champions to governorships and state legislatures in Colorado, Nevada, and Maine.

It’s good timing, because the federal government led by President Trump is dismantling environmental policies that are more critical than ever. And if we don’t act soon, climate change will bring a future of food shortages, mass extinctions, and natural disasters like we’ve never seen, as the United Nations’ IPCC report laid out in October.

“The IPCC report is harrowing,” says Kevin Smiley, a professor of environmental sociology at the University of Buffalo. “This is a time when a few states or cities have the opportunity to make a big stamp.”

Cuomo hasn’t released the details of his climate proposal yet, so we’ll have to wait and see if his promises carry weight. In the meantime, it’s worth asking: What would an ideal state climate plan look like, anyway? And how can states make sure their pledges are more than empty promises? I spoke with climate organizers and policy experts about what the states — New York as well as the other 49 — need to do to meet the very real, ever-knocking demands of climate change.

Think beyond electricity

Electricity accounts for only 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in New York, according to the state’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory, last updated in 2015. That’s a sizable chunk, but to take on that other 70 percent, Cuomo’s plan would need to consider every sector of the economy. That means all sources of greenhouse gas emissions, including buildings, transportation, and all forms of infrastructure, says Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who focuses on climate change and policy.

States can work together on their emissions targets, like the coalition of Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states that agreed on regional transportation goals, and the other state-based coalition that has set shared caps on greenhouse gas emissions through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. “We have a lot of small states that collectively can make a big difference,“ Carlson says.

Put the people most affected by climate change first

“Across the state, we can see that there are communities that have existing inequalities that are exacerbated by climate change,” says Adrien Salazar, a Campaign Strategist at Dēmos and member of New York Renews, a coalition of more than 100 climate and labor groups. “When we think about putting our economy on a path to 100 percent renewable energy, we want to make sure that those communities are invested in.”

New York state’s current energy plan doesn’t include explicit protections for these communities. New York Renews has been working to change this and pass the Climate and Community Protection Act, which would put the state on the path to running solely on renewable energy. It requires 40 percent of clean energy projects to be in communities impacted by climate change. The act would also give those communities ownership over these projects and ensure fair labor standards are in place.

Make it a law, not a suggestion

To ensure a climate change plan is more than empty rhetoric, its goals should be enforceable by law. That means that if a state fails to achieve its goals, legal action could hold it accountable.

Cuomo’s speech does not mark the first time New York has made a bold promise to commit to clean energy. Back in 2009, the state committed to transitioning to 45 percent renewable energy by 2015, but it failed to meet this goal … and faced no consequences.

Massachachusetts, on the other hand, made greenhouse gas limits enforceable by law through the 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act. As a result, lawsuits have since upheld that policy. In September, the state’s highest court dismissed an attempt to exempt power plants from emissions reduction rules. And in 2016, a group of youth activists won a lawsuit that challenged Massachusetts to develop more comprehensive regulations on greenhouse gases, per the requirements of the act.

Hawaii was the first state to have its renewable energy goals enshrined in law in 2015. Currently, the state is living up to them with ease. If Cuomo is serious about making New York “the most progressive state in the nation moving to renewables,” as he said in his speech, now he knows who he has to beat.

]]>GettyImages-1061174142Life after EPA: What is Scott Pruitt doing now?https://grist.org/article/life-after-epa-what-is-scott-pruitt-doing-now/
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 22:16:38 +0000http://grist.org/?p=412073Ever wonder what happens to people when they get booted from President Trump’s graces? (They don’t all wind up with a Saturday Night Live trip down memory lane.)

It’s been almost six months since Scott Pruitt was cut loose as head of the EPA, and for the most part he’s been keeping out of the spotlight. According to sources, Pruitt is using his industry connections to launch a private consulting business — you know, promoting coal exports and consorting with coal barons, the way a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency would.

However, Pruitt’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, says these new career pursuits will stop short of violating an official five-year ban on lobbying the EPA. After a mess of ethics violations and legal scandals, Pruitt is proceeding with caution. Mitchell says: “He has discussed multiple opportunities with me and has been quite careful not to do anything that is even close to the line.”

Although Pruitt’s fall from grace hasn’t been memorialized on SNL, he did become the butt of a few jokes by someone else — his former bestie, Donald Trump.

Evidently, Trump has congratulated Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt’s replacement, several times for not trying to buy used mattress from Trump Hotel. Yep. Pruitt did that. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little reuse, reduce, recycle — it may turn out to be one of Pruitt’s better moves for the environment.